Word: stolen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...allegations of stolen art mount against museums and institutions around the world, American museums are now attempting to strike a balance between adding to their permanent collections and ensuring that they don’t own antiquities that were illegally taken from foreign countries...
...Italian government got a truckload of evidence when its national police force raided the warehouse of Giacomo Medici, finding records of the pieces he had acquired from looters. The government sued Medici and fellow art dealer Robert Hecht for trafficking in stolen antiquities, and 10 years later, Marion True, a curator at the Getty Museum, was charged with being a co-conspirator. As the Getty Museum’s curator of antiquities since 1986, True allegedly purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Greek and Etruscan artifacts from Hecht and Medici...
This month, in Jerusalem, the Israel Museum features two new exhibitions that illuminate those dark days. "Looking for Owners" examines the sleuthing done by France to return artworks stolen during World War II to their owners, and shows 53 of the recovered paintings, while "Orphaned Art" presents 50 pieces of art that were looted from Holocaust victims and remain unclaimed. Both exhibitions, says James Snyder, director of the museum, are "about the same emotional subject - loss, and the sadness over a lost way of life...
...Rothschild collections were so well known that many works were traced and returned after World War II. The Israel Museum exhibits one luminous Dutch canvas by Pieter de Hooch stolen in Paris from Edouard de Rothschild and seized by Hitler's boundlessly rapacious second in command, Hermann Goering. But greed alone hardly explains the Nazis' frenzied grasp for Jewish-owned art, says curator Steinberg: "Taking an art collection was a way of stripping the Jew of what made him a citizen in the world." Out of gratitude for French help in restoring their stolen art, the Rothschilds donated...
Museums around the world have long had to contend with the issue of looted art. The British and French carted home priceless works from their conquests, and many museums have bought pieces stolen from archeological digs. But Nazi art plunder is an especially emotive issue because so many of the paintings were taken from Jews who later died in concentration camps amid the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century. Indeed, an exhibition like this might have been unthinkable a few decades ago, when the fate of lost treasures seemed inconsequential compared to the destruction of families and entire communities...